Rating: 
Summary: NJB User Review: One Month Later
Review: I got my Nomad Jukebox (NJB) just over three weeks ago. I am a committed MP3 fan, and I have owned both the Rio 300 and Rio 500 players. The NJB is, far and away, the best player on the market in terms of durability (Rios don't last in my experience), price/capacity ratio, playback options, and recording. If you have gotten this far, you probably already know all the specs. Here are the glitches I have found, and some solutions I recommend. 1. In my opinion, the battery life is the biggest limitation of this product. This device is a portable harddrive, and it eats power. As a result, Creative provides two sets of four 1600mAH rechargeable AA batteries. They look like normal Duracells, but a standard disposable battery contains about 750 mAh. This is milli-amps, a measure of the storage capacity of the battery. Four Duracells would probably last about 10 minutes in this thing. In short, you need super-batteries to run the NJB properly and the company gives you only two sets. Each set, when fully charged, get **optimal** play life of four hours. Plan on less. If you travel a lot, like me, and want the NJB for longer trips, you need to buy extra batteries and an external charger. (It comes with a cigarette-lighter adapter for the car) To optimize you batteries with the NJB, buy extra sets of 1600mAH batteries, and an external charger. Get a charger with a conditioning feature that fully drains the battery before recharging. You can run the Jukebox with no batteries inside, just connected to the AC. I always run my NJB on AC when available, and only charge my batteries in an external charger. 2. There are some annoying problems with the NJB that the company plans to fix soon. A few a really important for DJs who might want to use this for dance mixing. There is no A-B looping feature within a track, and the NJB places a pause between tracks that you cannot eliminate. These will be fixed, appartently in future firmware upgrades. My advice to people looking to use the NJB for DJing -- hold off the flurry to buy now, because the features you want are still a few months away. 3. There is another annoying problem that really irks me. The NJB can only recognize one song title, even if the album and artist are different. So if you want to put Ella Fitgerald's and Billie Holiday's version of "All of Me" on your NJB, you have to rename one of the tracks, e.g. "All of Me 1" and "All of Me 2" This is annoying, especially for classical music and jazz fans. 4. The cool headphones are not very loud. Many NJB users I know have purchased headphone amps to increase the sound. I am not much bothered by this, but you if like LOUD headphones, you need to buy another gagdet to get the most out of this. 5. Perhaps the biggest design flaw is that the reformatting function for the NJB is triggered by pressing "play" and "stop" together. Since they are the two largest buttons on the player, this was a mistake. It hasn't happened to me (you have to respond Y or N to "reformat?" ...I'm not that brave..) but this seems like a stupid mistake. 6. Plan on several weekends of CD ripping. I still have 2GBs to fill after intensive copying sessions. 7. You can not upload files with the .mp3 extension from the NJB back to your computer. But you can upload files with the .wav extension from NJB to computer, and you can simply add the .wav to any file on the NJB with the enclosed software. 8. As for the enclosed software, PlayCenter 2, its an adequate CD ripper/Mp3 encoder. Creative didn't spend a lot of time on the software. If you have a favorite encoding software, don't chuck it until you check out Playcenter. Its really weak, especially with multiple file transfers. 9. You need a pre-amped mike to record on the NJB. Basically this means a mike with a battery in it. I have one, and have made one recording. The recording is awesome, and very simple to do. All in all, the NJB is GREAT. I love it, I use it everyday. but there are some glitches that will be fixed in future upgrades, or at least you should be aware of.
Rating: 
Summary: Great for a first generation, but lots of room to improve
Review: In general, it's pretty well done, but it's the first generation of its kind, and there's a number of things that could be better. Good points: * 6gigs is nice, but easy to fill up. * Size is fine for home or car use * Navigation and use of the unit itself is pretty good. * Looks cool. * Sound quality is pretty good. Bad points: * Their proprietary software (PlayCenter 2, I think) may be okay in a generation or two. * Display is too small to use safely while you're driving * No cigarette lighter adapter included * Burns batteries quickly More about the software. First off, it's a snazy looking app, but the window is not resizable, so you're stuck looking at a fairly small portion of the available tracks. Second, the windows lack an edit menu -- especially a "select all" option. Third, copying to the Jukebox can be a huge pain if you get midway through copying a lot of tracks and have to restart. There is no way to automatically skip all tracks already on the player. There is an option to overwrite all, but that takes longer. Fourth, if you store your music with different subdirectories for each artist, then subdirectories for each album, it will take forever to get them on the Jukebox, as PlayCenter does not have an "all the files below this directory" option. Lastly, it would be nice to be able to bypass the PlayCenter software altogether and use Windows Explorer. SmartMedia readers for digital cameras show up as an extra hard drive -- this would be a much easier way to work with mp3's! All in all, the jukebox is very cool, anyway.
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Summary: The only MP3 player to own!
Review: This is the MP3 player to buy. At first the price may seem a little steep, but trust me it is so worth it. Everything about this player is user friendly. The user interface on the player itself is in my opinion just as easy to use, if not easier than the Rio 500. That's quite an accomplishment when you realize that the Jukebox has 6 GB of storage space. All of your MP3s are just a couple of pushes of a button away. It is so user friendly. I don't think I have even opened the manual yet. I just started ripping CDs and listening to music. Another great feature is the software that comes with the Jukebox. It too is very user friendly. I really appreciate the ability to rip CDs directly to the Jukebox without saving them to my hard drive. Personally I don't have 6 GB of space on my hard drive for MP3s, so this is a great feature for me. If you can spend the money, buy this player. You won't regret it. Ease of use, 6 GB of space, lightweight, and throw in the pre-loaded music and audio books, and you have a great deal.
Rating: 
Summary: 6 Gigs of music!
Review: At last, the 6 Gig Mp3 player finally showed up! I don't care if the batteries last only four hours. Usually, 4 hours is enough, and you can still buy more rechargeables. Got a fast internet connection? Got Napster, Imesh, and found the our-mp3 site? Then this Jukebox will be worth every penny! Pros : -6 Gigs, duh. -Fast upload. -Easy to use. Cons : -Rather heavy, but it doesn't weigh more than my CD player(Panansonic with metal body). -Plastic body that scratches easily. -For people who has slow connection, buy a cheap Mp3 player instead, because you will download for months until you obtain 6 gigs of music. At the end, there are some features missing from what I expected(random selection and smaller body), but 6 gigs... No more Cds, no more cheap Cd players... Woohoo!
Rating:
Summary: four days of continuous music
Review: I am very impressed with mine. I thought it had no random play ability or a pause ability, but after playing with it for a little bit, I have figured it out. I have had it have momentary freezes after uploading _a lot_ of information to it, but it has a nifty reset button. The batteries heat up when charging and their playing time is not so great also. But all in all, I think it is awesome. Especially since I can use it in my truck. 6 Gb MP3 player on the road? yep!
Rating:
Summary: Overplayed: Underdone
Review: If you're thinking of buying the NOMAD jukebox just for the amazing 6GB of space (which is the major plus point of it) don't! THe rumoured Sony Mp3 player with upto 10GB of space and loads more features will definately outplay this small gadget. It comes in handy during free lessons, or at other other awkwards moments in which you could definately live without it! I like: --> the download time of 15mb/s from my computer to the jukebox ---> the weight! ----> memory (considering others are still averaging around 64mb) -----> CoOOoOl backlight (which is NOT a reason you should buy it!) I don't like: --> NO scanning function! (aghhh! ) ---> too much for its own good! the guys at creative have been so busy eith the 6GB chip, they've let go of the basics as in more sound, and the forest/concert/stone room effects suck - they basically lower the music so much, you have to strain to listen to it! So - itz up to you... i found that the creative guys boasted too much and the expectations were too high for this gadget - in my book, its pricy, its got bugs, the design needs fixing so its something if i could return - i would and tick to me Discman!
Rating:
Summary: In a class by itself, with one major problem.
Review: There are people like myself who would deem a product like this a necessity rather than a luxury. I needed a place to store and backup my mp3's. The Nomad Jukebox can store mp3's like nothing else to date, almost 6 gigs of space. The problem is it cannot back-up anything. Once an mp3 is uploaded to the Jukebox, it cannot be downloaded. Is this flaw problematic enough to return this otherwise evolutionary product, and wait for something that can both upload and download mp3's? It was for me.
Rating: 
Summary: Jukebox fails to act like a jukebox
Review: While the idea of storing 150 CDs on a portable player may seem cool, it's not if you have a poor interface for listening to your songs. For starters, the Nomad does not have a "random" or "shuffle" feature, which is common on most CD players. You have to listen by artist, album, genre, or take the time to create a custom playlist. The other big problem is you can load MP3 files onto the Nomad, but you can download them to another machine. So if you plan on mapping this player to your network and using Napster to upload and download songs to the Nomad, you are out of luck. You will end of owning a 6 GB harddrive that has only one way to load or remove songs: you have to use its customised "Creative PlayCenter 2.0" software.
Rating:
Summary: Have IT, Absoloutely Love IT!
Review: I have dumped about a 1Gig worth of music into it so far, and that's about 16 hours worth of music. It is very fast at downloading to, about 1/4 th the play time, quality at 128Kb/s is SUPERB! Just wish there was a remote, soon I hear. Software works terrific. A steal of a deal for this kind of capacity. The blue unit is beautiful.
Rating:
Summary: This is nit-picking
Review: I just got it for a week. Generally it's a great product, good sound, navigating through LCD is rather easy. However, here are my complains: 1) No fast-forward/backward (within a track/mp3 file, you could skip forward/backward to next track though) 2) no pause button. (at least I haven't found it yet). This is a little bit painful if I want to listen to lengthy speech mp3s (e.g. audiobook). This means I cannot resume to the section I was listening to before I was interupted (e.g. "peanuts and diet coke, please, Ms. Airline attendent"). I think this should be easy to fix for their next release of firmware. But I am still trying to find their tech-support email for Jukebox. Battery life is not good either (4 hrs tops, I tried), but I could go around it, just bring extra set of batteries. Overall, it's "almost" a perfect system, if you only listen to music.
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